


in shadow and in light would run

by Mertiya



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Hurt/Comfort, Just a ficlet really, M/M, Mairon doesn't betray Tyelpe, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Mind Control, Touching, soft silver-gifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:36:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26185048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: Mairon has nightmares.  Tyelpe holds him.
Relationships: Annatar/Celebrimbor | Telperinquar
Comments: 12
Kudos: 39





	in shadow and in light would run

**Author's Note:**

> it'd be cool if I could do more than just this snippet in this verse but for the time being here have a tiny snippet, I don't know if it will turn into more later
> 
> title from the lay of leithian

Mairon woke up, and he wasn’t screaming, which was the worst part. He sat up, with a gasp, and he _could_ : he could move, he could think, he wasn’t trapped inside his head. And Tyelpe wasn’t screaming, either. Mairon's face was soaked through, so he’d been crying in his sleep again.

“Annatar?” Tyelpe’s sleepy voice. “Are you—oh.”

Mairon reached out a shaking hand towards him, needing to touch, needing to confirm that he wasn’t hurt, that he wasn’t bleeding, that he wasn’t dying. “Tyelpe,” he whispered, and his eyes brimmed over again, and his breathing sped up.

“Hey. Hey, shhhh.” Tyelpe sat up, his face still a little muddled with sleep, his long hair mussed, his eyes glinting faintly green in the lights of the safehouse. “It’s okay. Is it okay if I touch you?”

His heart was still racing, pounding in his ears. He couldn’t make it stop. He nodded, shakily, mutely, and Tyelpe slid across the bed and laid a gentle, careful hand on Mairon’s shoulder. It jerked a wild sob out of him, and he pressed his face to Tyelpe’s chest. “I dreamed it again,” he said hoarsely. “That it didn’t work. That I couldn’t stop him, and he—he hurt you—and I couldn’t stop him—I couldn’t even scream—I—”

Tyelpe kissed his forehead. “It was just a dream,” he said, his voice low and soothing. One hand began to rub circles across Mairon’s back gently, and he couldn’t stop himself from leaning into the touch. “It was just a dream, love, because you were too strong. You didn’t let him hurt me.” His other hand took Mairon’s, intertwining their fingers. “I thought I’d lost you,” he said, talking about the day that Mairon didn’t remember. That he couldn’t remember, that he could never remember, because the EMP that took out the SRON programming also took out a chunk of his own neural circuits. Very nearly all of them, in fact. He had expected it to take out all of them, and he’d told himself he was all right with that, because it would have meant keeping Tyelpe safe.

He hadn’t bargained for living through it.

The thing about still being alive was that it was _complicated_. Trauma, Mairon considered, was something that was supposed to happen to other people. _He_ was supposed to be able to lock it away in a box in his brain and throw away the key. It hadn’t worked out like that.

He was still sobbing. He ought to be able to stop, but all the elaborate filter systems in his brain that allowed him to finetune his emotions, to comb through his responses before he gave them, to discard the more useless ones—were gone. As if they’d never even existed. He didn’t remember it being like this, before everything, but maybe it had been. His memory wasn’t exactly the most reliable, these days.

“Shhh, beloved.” Tyelpe’s hand didn’t stop making those circles on his back. “Cry as much as you need to. We’re safe.”

“All my fault,” Mairon murmured, which was _true_ —he might not have _been_ the SRON in the end, but he’d helped program it. He’d done a lot worse than help program it, in the old days. And still, somehow, Tyelpe wanted him.

“That’s a bit presumptuous, even for you.” Tyelpe kissed his cheek, then went back to rubbing him. The touch of his hands was soothing and warm. Mairon wanted them everywhere, all over him, forever.

“I wish you could grow more hands,” he mumbled. “Think of it. We could design a thousand thousand prosthetic hands—maybe something based on your uncle’s design, and—”

“And they could all be petting you, is that it?” Tyelpe chuckled. “You are such a cat.” His other hand slid along the top of Mairon’s thigh, not in a tantalizing way, just in an exploratory kind of way. Mairon leaned into him, trying to drown himself utterly in Tyelpe’s smell and warmth and aliveness. 

“I’m not Annatar,” he muttered into Tyelpe’s neck, once the tears had finally stopped flowing. Tyelpe’s collar was soaked.

“Yes, you are,” Tyelpe said with a sigh, his voice fond and a little exasperated. Mairon felt that the exasperation was unfair. He hadn’t brought up this argument _once_ for an entire twelve hours. “I know—I know, you’re Mairon too. You were Mairon first. I don’t care. You’re my Annatar, and given what Mairon was willing to do for me, you’re also my Mairon.”

Mairon purred at _my Annatar_ , and wished he really could turn into a cat so he could curl up more fully in Tyelpe’s lap. He made himself as small as his two-inches-taller-than-Tyelpe frame allowed, pulling his legs into his chest. Tyelpe’s hands rubbed slowly over his shoulders, then his shoulder-blades and down, trailing a pleasant, tingling warmth. They rested on his waist, and he trembled a little. He could have lost this. And it would have been all his own doing. He still couldn’t stop the sharp, horrible memories of the day that the SRON activated—that he _remembered_ all of it, everything, all his memories of being _Mairon_ , everything he had promised he would do, but all of those memories turned inside out and made wrong and bitter—

And then his growing horror as he realized he could not stop it; he could not move; he could not take any actions nor stop his body from acting. He would have killed Tyelpe. No. He would have done worse. If he hadn’t managed to set off the EMP—and he was back here again. “I can’t get it to stop,” he mumbled. “The thoughts—they—they won’t stop.”

“Just be patient.” Tyelpe’s hands paused to squeeze his ass affectionately before moving on to stroke his sides.

Mairon groaned. “I’m terrible at patience. I literally built an entire program into my brain so I wouldn’t _have_ to be patient—”

“And look how well that turned out,” Tyelpe pointed out, a little sharply, and he subsided immediately. “Sorry,” Tyelpe continued after a moment.

“No,” Mairon said. “No—please don’t be sorry about that, don’t be sorry about _anything_ ever again, I owe you so many more apologies than you could ever owe me—”

A sigh. “That’s not how anything works.”

Mairon bit his lip. “You’re right. I’m so—” He bit it again. “Just hold me. Please.”

“I _am_ holding you.” He drew his nails down the insides of Mairon’s thighs, and Mairon gasped—it wasn’t a sexual pleasure, though it could have been at another time, but just the safety and heat of the sensations, grounding him here, in this moment of safety. Slowly, Tyelpe continued his exploration, sliding his hands down Mairon’s knees, circling his calves. He took one foot and pressed it gently between his hands, then the next. Then he went back to rub all those circles all over again over Mairon’s chest.

“All right?” he asked gently. Mairon, from inside a sweet cocoon of warmth, nodded sleepily.

“I love you,” he whispered, still clinging to Tyelpe.

“I love you, too,” Tyelpe whispered back. “You came back for me, Annatar. Twice.”

Mairon tangled his hands in Tyelpe’s long, silky hair and pressed their foreheads together so that their breath mingled. “I will always come back for you,” he said recklessly. No matter what the situation was outside the safehouse. No matter that the war was still raging, that there were plenty of people who would want to take both of them and use them. “I won’t let anyone break us apart again, not ever.”

“Neither will I.”

His heartbeat had slowed down, he realized, somewhere in all of the touching and quiet conversation, and he was able to stretch out a little and curl back up in bed properly, one arm still tight around Tyelpe. “All right now?” Tyelpe asked him, and he managed to mumble out, a _yes_ , and an _I hope I didn’t disturb you too much_.

“Oh, love.” Tyelpe huffed out a laugh. “My Annatar. My Mairon. We’ll get through this. The night always looks darkest just before the dawn.”

“Does not,” Mairon mumbled. “The few times I’ve actually _seen_ the dawn, it definitely got lighter just before—”

A finger on his mouth stilled his objection. Tyelpe nipped at his ear. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes.” He pressed his face into Tyelpe’s shoulder. “It will get better,” he said, agreeing mostly for the sake of not disagreeing. He didn’t actually believe it. But he had to admit that just saying it was enough to make him feel a little better. “It will get better,” he said again, and Tyelpe murmured a sleepy agreement, and it was— _almost_ —enough.


End file.
